alt Hacker NewsKugelblitz – Mac-Native Google Earth Alternative
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Kudos to Tim for creating this! In the last Freakshow Podcast he gave a walkthrough of how he created it.
https://freakshow.fm/fs313-der-tripelpunkt-der-metaebene
As other commenters said: TerraVision vibes.
In case you're wondering, "Kugelblitz" is German for "ball lightning" (literally "spherical lightning")- probably refers to showing the "sphere" (the Earth) as fast as lightning?
this kind of app would really benefit from having NSScrollEdgeEffectStyle set to .soft. the huge toolbars (which tbf, is the fault of Liquid Glass, not the developer) and their opaque background takes away a lot of space that could be a peripheral for the map with NSScrollEdgeEffectStyle.
also, the Hide Toolbar option hides the traffic lights too...? this isn't standard macOS behavior...
what data sources are you using for the global satellite imagery? I’m building mosaics for my own app but don’t have the pockets to pay for licensed data right now. NAIP is fantastic for the US but I’d really like to get z16+ coverage for Europe, too
Great ! I tried it on my apple M1Pro and it works fine :) I would not put the grid at first lunching and I'd like that the earth keep spinning a bit when throwing it with the mouse !
Cool! Want to add clouds? Here are some ideas to try!
Https://Earthlove.live
does it have all the tooling that the original google earth had, or is it more like apple maps?
> Kugelblitz shows the Earth and its neighbors as a globe and as an atlas you fly over smoothly like a pilot, even on an M1
As if Google Earth wasn’t smooth on a 2.0 GHz Pentium 4 in 2009
Ah, doesn't work on Sequoia 15.8.x. I wonder what features my Mac is missing to display a sphere with data.
> Smooth, even on an M1...
Well, I would certainly excpect that an application that was already running smoothly on vanilla computers around 2005 also runs smoothly on a computer from 2020 ;)
Can we pay $4 to have the AI only build the software and not the marketing materials?
Is it really too much to ask to at least edit the slopscription?
Kugelblitz shows the Earth and its neighbors as a globe and as an atlas you fly over smoothly like a pilot, even on an M1. Imagery, road map and topographic map lie on real terrain, joined by thousands of open maps from the Library. Everything comes from freely available geodata, straight from its publishers, OpenStreetMap from the Kugelblitz tile server; you need no account.
Everything loaded stays in the cache, and Kugelblitz instances in the same network share it with each other if you wish. Status windows tell how far the view has loaded, where you are looking and where its data comes from, and every source is listed with its license in “Sources and Licenses”. Kugelblitz speaks German and English and uses the units of your choice.Please just fix Apple Maps
With the upcoming retirement of google earth (desktop), I'd also recommend looking into geolibre for this sort of thing. No it doesn't come by default with a nice full color photo mapped onto 3D terrain as google earth does, but for less technical users or those with less complex demands, it has a much lower learning curve/complexity than giving people a full QGIS setup with a bunch of back-end db connected.
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> Kugelblitz shows the Earth and its neighbors as a globe and as an atlas you fly over smoothly like a pilot, even on an M1.
Even on M1? Didn't Google Earth run smoothly when it came out? (Which was apparently 25 years ago, oh my goodness!)